Auditors Highlight Inefficiency, Underperformance At Agricultural Biotech Center

The Office of the Federal Auditor General has put the Ethiopian Agricultural Biotechnology Research Center on blast for glaring failures and inefficiency that auditors say have been rolling down for years.

The Center is an arm of the Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research (EIAR), and oversees around two dozen research centers across the country with a mandate to advance and improve agricultural productivity, food security, and exports, among other things, using biotechnology.

Federal auditors say the Center is performing poorly. They found that many of the projects slated for completion in 2025 as part of a 15-year strategy scheduled to wrap at the end of the decade have not been finalized and are instead being repeatedly postponed.

Auditors have criticized the Center for launching a strategy before instituting a guiding biotechnology policy, and say its projects in plant, animal and microbial biotechnology are hobbled by a lack of capacity, weak institutional arrangement, unsuitable finance and procurement systems, inefficient manpower, IT problems, and unclear administrative structures and ethics systems.

The Center’s administrators argue they moved ahead with the strategy in the face of delays in drafting and ratifying a policy, for which they say the more recently established Bio and Emerging Technologies Institute is responsible. They also say a draft policy they forwarded to the Council of Ministers has yet to be ratified.

Among the Center’s unfinished projects are work on improved cotton varieties, particularly relating to acidic-soil resistance, and plans to grow low-caffeine coffee, which its administrators say has been held back by the country’s laws.

Other projects were delayed or suspended due to budget constraints, they told auditors.

The audit report also highlights a trend where biotechnology projects are conceived and carried out without recognition or approval from the Center. An example is a project involving teff improvement, which took place between 2022 and 2024 without official approval.

The disarray in planning and execution is leading to the mismanagement of donor funds without a meaningful contribution to society, according to the audit report.

Auditors found that while the Center was granted government approval to hire 24 experts specializing in microbial biotechnology research and new findings in this field, only 13 have so far been onboarded. This is partly due to the lack of specialized manpower, which often forces the Center to make do using experts in related fields.

The report criticizes the Center for failing to develop and train the manpower necessary to fill the skill gap.

Auditors say experts pursuing higher education degrees while working at research centers in Debre Zeit, Melkasa, and Adami Tulu are struggling to conduct their research owing to low budget allocations. Graduate students at these centers receive 50,000 Birr, while postgraduate researchers get three times as much to conduct their work.

However, the funding is insufficient to cover the costs of equipment and materials purchases necessary for the studies, meaning that researchers often fail to finalize their degrees on time, according to the report.

It also indicates that the research being conducted at the center is not being diffused into society, industries, or the country’s wider development.

“The studies are only going to publication, and no further,” it reads.

The production of prototypes, and distribution to farmers, industries, and multipliers is lacking, according to auditors. They also accuse the Center’s administrators of failing to foster collaboration with other institutions in related sectors.

The research that is conducted there has thus far produced useful tools and methodologies, such as single-cell proteins that can be used for chicken fodder, improved injera preservation techniques, and a type of yeast that enables quicker production of ence related foods, but these findings were neither patented nor distributed for use.

Center administrators argue some of their work is hindered by laws against gene editing, which they claim are in the process of being changed.

Regarding tissue cultures for hybrid varieties of coffee, potato, sweet potato, false banana and palm, the Center failed to produce improved varieties, and transfer them to seed multipliers and end users. The Center also failed to produce and distribute improved varieties of productive animal breeds (Assisted Reproductive Technology for Selective Animal Breeding) for society and industries, states the report.

The Center does not work with seed multipliers, unions, producers, exporters or manufacturers. It also does little to facilitate and ensure the supply of chemicals, reagents and inputs for agri-research centers and operators in the sector, reads the report.

Center administrators blamed the country’s lengthy and complicated public procurement procedures for these shortfalls.

The audit report also detailed that the Center has been procuring capital projects without planning, bids, or approval from its parent institution, EIAR. Auditors have accused its administrators of moving budgets from project to project.

The report notes that researchers and students sent abroad to further their education often do not return.

In a letter to Leta Tulu (PhD), director of the Center, the Attorney-General highlighted the need for improvement.